Cyberpunk 2077 Remade as a PlayStation One Game

A creator named Barely Regal is working on a “demake” of Cyberpunk 2077 that turns it into a PS1-era adventure called Cyberpunk 1997.

Barely Regal’s latest YouTube video offers us a glimpse of the progress that he’s made thus far, and the results are legitimately impressive. Using the game/tech builder Dreams (a title that is responsible for some of the more impressive fan projects in recent internet memory), Regal has converted the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 into something that combines a few notable gameplay styles of the PS1 days. 

The demo starts in the player’s apartment where you are able to equip weapons, eat food, re-spect your character, and generally do many of the things that you’ll be able to do in Cyberpunk 2077. Of course, the difference is that the whole thing looks like a PS1 game. We also imagine that the options aren’t quite as deep as what you’ll get in the real thing (and the interface is almost certainly rougher), but hey, that’s to be expected. 

We then transition to a marketplace where the player is able to purchase various goods from several NPCs. The graphics of this section certainly resemble many PS1 first-person shooters like the early Medal of Honor games, but we’re struggling to think of a PS1 title that utilized similar gameplay ideas via a first-person perspective. Still, the whole thing does feel accurate to something of this design that we would have seen on that console.

Where things get really interesting (at least from a retro gameplay point of view) is when the player exits the market and we transition to an overhead old-school GTA view. The player is able to drive around the game’s city via this view, which honestly feels like something a developer from that era would have utilized if they were ambitious enough to try to create a Cyberpunk-like open-world (or large world) experience on the PlayStation. 

As we noted earlier, though, one of the most impressive aspects of this project is that it’s being entirely made via the PS4 “game” Dreams. We continue to be amazed at what that technology is capable of, and we’re especially interested in seeing whether Barely Regal is able to develop a complete demake of Cyberpunk 2077 using only the Dreams engine. 

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.